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geni wrote:
On 5/4/06, Rob gamaliel8@gmail.com wrote:
I'd think this counts as a disruption of the normal workings of afd and is blockable on those grounds. Isn't this exactly why we were so concerned about userboxes - to prevent this sort of thing from happening?
That would depend on which set of claims you belived.
In any case it appears at least one of the people used a list compiled from past AFD votes.
Well, specifically, a list of all of the people who had voted Delete in the previous vote. That user made no attempt to notify any of the Keep voters. It's this kind of selective voting recruitment (aka vote-stacking) that is so harmful to Wikipedia. When I canceled that Afd it was leaning heavily towards Delete, but that was only because two Delete vote-stackers had been out campaigning heavily and there was only one Keep vote-stacker who had just begun operations. The end result would've just been another no consensus once both sides were "properly" marshaled.
The kind of actions I'm describing here are pretty clearly disruptive and work against the policies we have in place for deciding issues. It's extremely harmful. Note that the ArbCom has already come out against vote-stacking, in one form or another, in three separate instances:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/IZAK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Guanaco%2C_M... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Jason_Gastri...
In the past many blocks have been issued to deal with these issues. Yet suddenly we're running into a lot of resistance from people who are saying it isn't explicitly listed in policy. Well, since policy is simply a written-down version of what happens in practice, we need to modify policy. The only single diehard policy is "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia", and it's pretty clear that these vote-stacking campaigns I've been describing go against that ultimate goal of making the best encyclopedia we can.
- -- Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys")
~ Sub veste quisque nudus est ~